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Sculpture of Folded Steel Rises in the Shadow of Buffalo’s Grain Elevators

Sculpture of Folded Steel Rises in the Shadow of Buffalo’s Grain Elevators

The sculptural wall designed and built by architecture faculty members Chris Romano and Nick Bruscia is the result of a collaboration with Rigidized Metals Corporation. The wall, with Silo City's hulking grain elevators in the background, is made from 152 pieces of super-thin, textured steel.

By Charlotte Hsu

“The beauty of this material is that the structure and the aesthetics are one and the same — the texturing of the steel gives it added strength.”

Nick Bruscia, Clinical Assistant Professor

Department of Architecture

Architecture faculty members Nick Bruscia and Chris Romano
commute two or three days a week to a studio in an awe-inspiring
location: Silo City, where iconic grain elevators rise like giants
on the banks of the Buffalo River.

In this classic Rust Belt workspace, the friends and colleagues
have been designing — and fabricating — structures that
explore new uses for textured steel.

Their latest project: A 20-foot-high trapezoidal wall woven
together from 152 pieces of super-thin steel. Each metal panel has
been folded into one of 44 different shapes, and the geometric
patchwork gives the sculpture a kaleidoscopic feel.

The wall, designed through computational modeling, has been
erected near Silo City’s Ohio Street entrance. It’s
special in part because it will be crafted from an ultra-thin,
strong and light-weight stainless steel. The material was
manufactured and fabricated by Buffalo’s Rigidized Metals
Corporation, which embosses metal with various geometric patterns
to make it more durable and attractive.

“This type of steel is typically used in ornamental
applications for interior or exterior cladding, and we’ve
turned it into a self-supporting structure,” said Romano, a
research assistant professor in the Department of Architecture.
“It’s a research project: It faces Lake Erie, and
we’re going to see how the material performs in high winds
and winter weather.”

The wall, located next to Rigidized Metals’ headquarters
on Ohio Street, will be a permanent installation that functions as
a gateway into Silo City.

Sculptural Wall Made from Local Materials Wins International Prize

Nov. 11, 2013 - Bruscia and Romano have won an international competition with their proposal to build a wall from panels of super-thin steel folded into wild geometric patterns. Read more about their first-place prize in the TEX-FAB Digital Fabrication Alliance’s digital fabrication competition.

It’s a fitting landmark: A project that reinvents an
industrial material, on a site that has become a symbol of Rust
Belt innovation. The cluster of grain elevators has become a
hotspot for creative thinking over the past few years, with
entrepreneurs converting one of the silos into a rock climbing
facility and hosting an art and cultural fair called “City of
Night” inside the massive buildings. Last year, UB
architecture and planning students built a stainless steel tower
nearby to house a colony of rescued bees.

To work in the shadow of grain elevators — to walk or
glance outside and see them sprawling skyward — is a
remarkable experience, said Bruscia, a UB clinical assistant
professor of architecture.

“It’s interesting, it’s fantastic, the time of
my life, really,” he said. “Being down here and working
alongside all of these people is inspiring. And the grain elevators
— there’s so much history around them, and their scale
is amazing.”

He and Romano are proud to be a part of Buffalo’s storied
industrial identity. Rigidized Metals funded the wall’s
construction, and company owner Rick Smith has been keenly
interested in the architects’ work in exploring new uses for
the firm’s materials. The School of Architecture and
Planning, meanwhile, has benefited from the company’s ability
to bend and fold metal in ways that the school cannot do on its
own.

“The collaboration with Rigidized Metals advances our
material knowledge, and at the same time, their product,”
Romano said. “They are experts in the field of metals, and
they taught us a ton about the material and how it behaves. We
brought an energy and curiosity to their manufacturing process,
finding opportunities and areas where we could try new
things.”

“It’s been a lot of fun to work with these
guys,” said Chip Skop, director of sales and marketing at
Rigidized Metals. “They’ve really injected a lot of
energy into our business.”

The partnership is one result of Department of Architecture
Chair Omar Khan’s efforts to cooperate with local
manufacturers — outreach that has led to new courses and
research on materials from metals to terra
cotta.

The collaboration began in 2012, when Bruscia and Romano taught
graduate seminars asking students to think about the qualities and
applications of textured steel.

Then, the professors and students designed metal window screens
to outfit their studio on the second floor of a formerly abandoned
Silo City office building. Each screen bears a pattern of holes or
stamped designs that reflect and channel light in unique ways. For
the sculptural wall, Master of Architecture students Daniel Vrana
and Philip Gusmano have spent the past several months taking the
project from concept to production.

The Silo City gateway wall is the first in a line of prototypes
that Bruscia and Romano hope to create as they advance their
research and partnership with Rigidized Metals.